Thread by @GarettJones

Do immigrants fully assimilate?

A big question in immigration politics.

In Chapter 4 of Open Borders, Caplan takes on the vast empirical literature showing that immigrants
pass on some of their political & social attitudes to the second generation and beyond.

[Thread]

Here’s what one of Caplan’s key sources, Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh, has said about whether second generation immigrants fully assimilate to destination-country political & social attitudes:

fee.org/articles/will-…

Here’s what Harvard’s Alberto Alesina & UCLA’s Paola Giuliano had to say in the same year, 2015, about whether the descendants of immigrants fully assimilate:
scholar.google.com/scholar?cluste…

Let’s look at those quotes together, with their contrasting views on whether immigrants fully assimilate:

I could just drop the mic there & be done for the day—you can click on the Alesina/Giuliano paper & skim the key papers they mention—but let’s dive a little deeper.

Here's some evidence from the above-mentioned Alesina/Giuliano, plus Algan & Cahuc whose other work Caplan discusses.

They find family values migrate to a noticeable degree, & family values look a lot like anti-market values.

scholar.google.com/scholar?cluste…

Maybe the U.S. is bad at assimilation.

This LSE paper just looks at Europeans moving within Europe.

They check whether 1st (x-axis) & 2nd (y-axis) generation immigrants hold attitudes on various topics similar to those living in the country of origin:

scholar.google.com/scholar?cluste…

The axis values are correlations.

Look at the 3 traits where the 2nd-generation correlation is bigger than 0.5. Roughly:

Is it bad for moms to work when kids are preschool-aged?

If people don't work, do they get lazy?

Who should take care of folks: individuals or the state?

The middle range, with 0.3 or so 2nd generation correlations, includes (paraphrasing)

"Can you mostly trust folks?"

"How important is family?"

If in your view, any assimilation greater than zero counts as a success, then great, there's some assimilation!

Without a structural model (a full view of the world) and an objective function (i. e., a set of social goals), hard to know how much assimilation on institutional quality issues is good enough.

I won't take that on today.

But I will show you results on savings rates:

Two papers, one looking at immigrants to Germany & one at immigrants to the UK, get the same result, & yeah, they kick the tires more than I will in a Twitter thread:

From the UK paper, the 2nd generation result (though they also look at the 3rd):

scholar.google.com/scholar?cluste…

Here are the German findings.

Attitudes toward the future--time preference, one might say--appear to be nontrivially culturally persistent. They survive migration to an important degree.

In the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, out last month:

scholar.google.com/scholar?cluste…

Caplan agrees that in some cases—like attitudes toward free speech--attitudes of lower-skilled immigrants differ substantially from those of other citizens.

But he says that won’t shape government noticeably because the US government largely ignores the views of the poor.

Whatever weight you put on that “optimistic” scenario, I doubt it will be close to 100% true, for the foreseeable future, in all rich countries.

And the above research suggests lots of non-poor folks are importing attitudes to the 2nd generation.

There’s much more to be said about immigrant assimilation, but the evidence is universal:

Total, eventual assimilation on economically & politically important attitudes is a myth, & scholars should publicly, candidly treat it as such.

I’ll close with those contrasting quotes: